Tales From A Bus by jwilson136 (finding audrey TXT) 📕

convince my legs and arms to move.
I’ll always remember playing Blinds Mans Bluff as a kid and I’ll always remember that it scared the shit out of me. The whole idea of the game is a sick one, one man blinded and he tries to grab all the others. Well that was what I had to do. There in front of me and the way out (I wasn’t even thinking about downstairs), stood a big headless fucker, arms outstretched and moving quickly from left to right and back again across the small aisle way. The rest of the passengers, now with their new heads intact made no move towards me but as soon as I moved they all let out a warning moan and the headless thing reacted. Don’t ask me how he could fucking hear but if I moved left they’d all moan the thing would move to his right to block my escape. All the time I was screaming but I didn’t really expect to attract any wanted attention.
Soon the headless thing and I were maybe five feet apart. I stopped and thanks to a moan from his sideline helpers it stopped too. And there we stood, facing each other as best as the circumstances allowed. I never felt more like Odysseus in my life.
There was nothing to do except make a break for it.
I darted first to my left and it reacted, then in a spinning move called the ‘butterfly’ in American Football I spun round to the right using my back against it’s chest as leverage and while it turned almost as quickly and managed to grab a good piece of my shirt, thanks to shoddy clothes wear and weak buttons I was free and down the stairs.
The bottom level was deserted and the bus was no longer moving. It was the same as when I’d gotten on it at first, dirty and poorly lit but to my joy I saw that the fucking doors were open. Without looking left nor right I ran to the doors and jumped out landing heavily on the sidewalk and breaking an ankle in the process.
As I lay there on the path in my own shirt, with my leg screaming in pain, my heart thumping out eighty beats per every half minute and my shirt torn I heard an inhuman voice sing in a deadpan voice the words to an old Sheryl Crow song.
“A change....will do you good. I mean a change.....will do you good..”
I looked up and saw the doors of the bus slowly close on the bus driver and it pulled slowly away. I sat where I was and cried for a long, long time.

Life over the next few months got quite hazy for me, I wandered the streets (on crutches) avoiding buses whenever they approached me and I guess if I’d gone to a head doctor he would have told me that I was suffering from a complete mental breakdown. But sure as Bob Dylan so rightly said, you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows. I’m not really sure how long I stayed in this state but when my mind returned to me I began to think it over and wondered if maybe I’d made the wrong decision. Like, what would have happened to me if I’d stayed on the bus ? Would I have lost my head, (if it’s not loosing your head it’s gaining another). My life was shit, and really I had between fuck all and nothing left to live my current life for. So about two weeks ago I came to a life changing decision; I wanted to find the purple bus.
And I guess you could say that’s why I’m here, my current head is of fuck all use to me now so I’m looking for a change.”

When I tell you silence was what greeted the end of my story I’m under stating things. There wasn’t a sound at all on the bus. Even when I began humming there was no reaction from any of them and it was only when I started rocking backward and forward that the woman started screaming. And once she’d started she didn’t stop for a long, long time.


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Publication Date: 10-27-2010

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